Ever since the fall of the Sikh Empire in 1849, there has been a crisis of leadership in GurSikh affairs. The general trend has been towards fragmentation and subsumption into modes of being contrary to the Gurūs’ example. Charismatic individuals and popular movements sporadically inspire broad support, but strategic coordination and the acknowledgement of legitimate authority rarely outlive leaders or the specific exigencies necessitating mobilization. Glimmers of life exist in the work of visionary individuals, yet even their outsized contributions make little headway against the overwhelming tide of enervation in the Panth’s collective existence.
Securing a brighter GurSikh future requires the development of a long-term strategy, but our institutions no longer cultivate the vīchār, or exacting deliberation, necessary for arriving at rational agreement. The responsibility thus falls to individual Sikhs to clearly set forth their respective understandings of the nature of our situation. Lively debate must be welcomed so long as it proceeds from love for the Gurūs’ endowments. Coordination will emerge from sound analysis and those capable of grasping it. Where the stakes are high and there is no clear plan in sight, diffidence in the cognizance of one’s limitations must give way to candor—further encouraged by the prospect that even should one’s reason falter, the wise may be tickled out of silence by follies too ludicrous not to gut.
At the outset, let me relate the basic observation that at once fires me with indignation and resolve: our present rudderlessness is deplorably at odds with the magnificence of our inheritance. The existence of Gurū Nanak and his nine successors in historical time is of prime significance for humanity’s trajectory, and their complete radiance is manifest today in the eternally valid and perennially realizable words of Srī Gurū Granth Sāhib. In the annals of world history, the Gurū period numbers among the rare epochs when human beings of the most outstanding quality acted in time. We may therein witness the triumph of compassion, reflection, fortitude, devotion, courage, magnanimity, and humility over the self-enslaving forces of tyranny.
The lives of the Gurūs are timeless, for in attaining a perfect relation to the Self-Existent Creator of all things, they furnish immutable standards for evaluating all things across all times. Let us not be fooled by the semantic debasement of our unmannerly age; it is no empty honorific when we call Bābā Nanak the ‘Gurū.’ Illuminating Bhāī Lehna, he gave us Gurū Angad, thereby revealing that his true form is timeless. The living passage of supreme illumination and temporal sovereignty from Gurū Nanak, through his successors, into Srī Gurū Granth Sāhib and the whole Panth is among the most remarkable stories in human history, and it is far from being over. Though our individual successes may be noteworthy for our modest numbers, our collective being falls short of our extraordinary calling.
If ours is not a problem of meaning, neither is it one of resources. In late March, the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee passed a budget for 2021 to 2022 amounting to $123 million. Sikh philanthropists and their foundations have endowed a variety of initiatives—both independent and nestled within non-Sikh institutions—ranging from academic to humanitarian operations in India and abroad. Commendable as some of the work doubtless is, it is doubtful whether institutional and private funding is optimally allocated. For instance, investment in identifying and minting a new generation of leaders honed by distinctively GurSikh learning is notably lacking. Beyond signaling the relative importance of different activities, access to resources plays a significant role in determining how most people spend most of their productive time. Ours is not a problem of insufficient resources, but of their inadequate deployment.
Explaining our dissipation of considerable spiritual and material riches necessitates some consideration of the hegemonic ideological current of our age, which has statist, progressivist, scientistic, equalitarian, materialistic, and illiberal aspects. It is respectable at present to believe the state is and ought to be the prime agent of societal progress, which is recognizable in greater scientific understanding of the natural world, less inequality in the distribution of material resources produced by efficient but problematic markets, and increased public accommodation of stigmatized groups.
A mix of equalitarianism and scientistic assertion supplies the moral impetus for centralizing power, as well as for implementing social and economic sanctions for noncompliance. If this arrangement is to provide for society’s technological and moral progress, individuals are to find personal fulfillment in the satisfaction of goals and desires ranging from professional advancement to ultra-tailored consumption. Only statements capable of empirical falsifiability can have the imprimatur of fact on this view, and while there are no transcultural or transhistorical moral truths to be known and to help us distinguish between praiseworthy and blameworthy conduct, whoever contravenes today’s orthodoxy must be ritually shamed and ostracized.
It is not that most Sikhs knowingly aim to reinterpret our inheritance so as to conform with the tyranny of the zeitgeist. For what else did Gurū Har Rai disown his eldest son? From the academy to corporate life, from the media to entertainment, the cultural current nonetheless exerts a peremptory and pervasive force on the default interpretation for understanding and navigating the world. It is simpler to adopt the ready-made cultural roles of assimilation, repudiation, or victimhood than to stand athwart the current and rediscover the virtues of sovereignty. Yet the apparent ease of acquiescence is not without a steep price: it is deeply corrosive to knowingly collaborate with falsehood, and even where one fails to recognize it as such, complicity in untruth is no less self-fragmenting.
Discussion of the related intellectual opiates of positivism, historicism, and postmodernism falls beyond the scope of the present essay. (Incidentally, I subjected an unsuspecting Los Angeles audience to my five-minute critique of these paradigms as applied to the study of GurSikh phenomena on the occasion of Gurū Gobind Singh’s sesquarcentennial to general bewilderment. For the most part, the other attendees avoided me during lunch.) For the present, I can say that the theoretical posturing of these approaches rank with enervating enthymemes obscures the phenomena of greatest spiritual urgency and intellectual appeal to me, and when applied to Sikh matters, heap even more detritus on the GurSikh palimpsest. The distinction between the uncompromising, uncolonized witness of a singular GurSikh vidvān and the ‘decolonial’ lens in Sikh Studies thus strikes me as paramount.
Such academics are nonetheless correct that conceptual shear occurs when GurSikh ideas and practices are forcibly translated into non-equivalent categories. Temporarily putting aside the reductionistic distortion of its appropriation into English, try finding a satisfactory stand-in for ‘Gurū.’ A single-word equivalent may well not exist, since concepts exist in a complex nexus of relations to other concepts and cultural associations. Words often carry implicit ontological claims and axiological content, not to neglect the history of their prior incarnations in a dynamically unfolding discursive environment. That being said, it is also possible to retreat into a realm of nominalistic solipsism. If meanings across cultures are so radically incommensurable as to be wholly unintelligible, why bother with a dialogue that is doomed from the outset?
Particularist camps take great exception to the application of the universalist category ‘religion’ beyond Christianity, and occasionally posit unbridgeable differences in the understanding of God between traditions. But the existence of differences presupposes a something over which to differ. The proper function of contextualization is to help us precisely identify the distinctive characteristics of the phenomenon of interest. Contextualization is abused where it is used to explain away or bury the phenomenon among other phenomena bearing a superficial resemblance. As the recognition of meaningful similarities must not preclude the recognition of meaningful differences, so the recognition of meaningful differences must not preclude the recognition of meaningful similarities. We possess the liberty to pose any questions we will of an object, but its properties—and not solely our interests—play a role in determining which ones will yield interesting answers. On the question of whether the One God is One or many, from Gurū Nanak to Gurū Gobind, from Gurū Arjan to Bhagat Kabir, there is no explaining away the Oneness they perceive in the object of Hindu and Islamic worship.
To better understand the role GurSikhī plays in your beliefs about the world, consider the following question: absent knowledge of the Gurūs, can you name any positions important to you that would flip? Cases of possible overdetermination—those where the zeitgeist seems to match the Gurūs’ teaching—demand particularly careful handling. Take, for example, what we might call the GurSikh problem of equality. As early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Gurū Nanak and his successors castigated and prohibited caste discrimination, injustices against women—including satī, burning widows alive with their dead husbands—and economic exploitation. Gurū Nanak and his successors have been lauded for their commitment to ‘social justice’ avant la lettre.
Based on my foregoing remarks, it would be inconsistent were I to discount the possibility of a phenomenon’s existence prior to its coming to be known by a particular name. The actual difficulty with such an approach is that it inductively subsumes historical particulars under a general characterization—namely ‘social justice’—which equivocally also serves as a rhetorical banner for a particular set of contemporary political causes. The lexical ambiguity allows for invalid inferences of the kind ‘because Gurū Nanak promoted justice in early modern South Asian society, he would automatically support whatever contemporary advocates of social justice champion.’ What is more, this sophistical bait-and-switch obscures what is most interesting: the independent, prior, and perennially realizable grounding of Gurū Nanak’s moral judgements. At the same time as Mahārāja Ranjit Singh’s Lahore boasted an educational system for males and females superior to Britain’s, religious toleration with key offices open to ability regardless of creed, and the elimination of capital punishment, enslaved Africans labored on American soil.
In 1989, as eminent an American philosopher as “liberal ironist” Richard Rorty confessed he cannot—and claims we need not—furnish an answer to the question, “‘Why not be cruel?’” The astonishing technological and economic power generated by western democracies cannot be overlooked, but neither can it compensate for what amounts to spectacular failure in a key strand of western rationalism. America’s experiment in self-government is articulated and legitimated in terms of “self-evident” truths and “certain unalienable rights” endowed by our Creator. The intense polarization within democratic regimes and their susceptibility to illiberal challenges are intimately bound up with the descent of practical philosophy into unreason in our age. I believe serious engagement with Gurū Nanak will in due course prove more theoretically fruitful and congenial to human dignity than Heidegger’s return to the Pre-Socratics.
Close engagement with Bānī Gurū will immediately furnish propositions that seem fantastical if translated in terms of the hegemonic ideology of our age and taken as precepts for practical action. “Kaljug mahi kīrtanu pardhānā” becomes something like, ‘In this dark age, Sikh sacred music is most efficacious.” In light of contemporary praxis, this would indeed seem a quixotic strategic postulate. Yet encountering and myself learning to sing the One’s virtues through Gurū Nanak’s kīrtan as transmitted unaltered by the Gurbāṇī Saṅgīt Paramparā has indelibly altered my understanding of human possibility. Through this inestimable anjan from the Gurūs, we possess an irrefragable foundation for revitalizing GurSikh praxis through the key of the Gurūs’ endowment. The spiritual refulgence of the sangat shall once again yield ostensive proof of Gurbānī’s truth. As Gurū Nanak journeyed across the world, engaging diverse traditions in contemplative dialogue, let us not fear as alien encountering whatever ideas may help us better understand the wondrous One from whom we all originate. To do good, it is necessary to contemplate knowledge. “Vidia vīchārī tā(n) parupkārī.” What good we accomplish will demonstrate the depth of our understanding. Through such reflection, our victories for the common good will belong to the timeless One. It is time to recover a culture of vīchār.
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Nihal Singh